Bernhard Blumenkranz

Origins and early life

Bernhard Blumenkranz was born in Vienna on 12 June 1913 into an Orthodox Jewish family originally from Poland; he himself did not practise, but the subject he spent his life on was the history of his own people. He studied in Switzerland and took his doctorate at Basel with a dissertation on Augustine's preaching to the Jews, published there in 1946 — a young Jewish scholar in the year after the war choosing to examine the Christian theology of contempt at its source.

Work and career

Settled in France, he became a director of research of exceptional class at the CNRS and taught at the École pratique des hautes études and at the Sorbonne Nouvelle. He founded the French Commission of Jewish Archives in 1961 to save what remained of the community records, and in 1971 created at the CNRS the team of the Nouvelle Gallia Judaica, charged with establishing, place by place, the medieval Jewish geography of France; the work continues today.

He was the first to read the iconography seriously as evidence for Jewish-Christian relations, showing what church sculpture and manuscript illumination had said about Jews long before any pamphlet. The Académie française gave him the Prix Eugène Piccard in 1983. He died in Paris on 4 November 1989.